Timely but not the author’s finest work.
An acclaimed American author looks at sexual abuse.
On a warm summer night in the 1970s, teenage Jo convinces her two best friends, Carly and Stephanie, to steal a golf cart at the country club and go for a drunken joy ride. Jo is behind the wheel, so she is the one responsible when an accident leaves Stephanie dead. Jo and her family become outcasts in their small Maryland suburb, so it seems like a stroke of luck when Jo is accepted into an elite boarding school in Massachusetts. Hawthorne is full of kids from Manhattan, the children of the rich and famous. Jo left home because she had become an outcast, but she’s no more welcome in her new school than she was in her hometown. The only person who takes much interest in her is a charismatic English teacher the students simply refer to as “Master.” Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that his attention isn’t the good kind. Much of Jo’s story will be depressingly predictable to most readers, from a powerful man using his position to prey on children to the skeptical, largely untroubled reaction Jo receives when she tries to tell a school administrator what happened to her. But Walbert doesn’t bring much that’s new or thought-provoking to this familiar tale. Part of the trouble is formal. Walbert is well-known for both her short fiction and novels-in-stories like The Sunken Cathedral (2015) and Our Kind (2004). Her new book is being marketed as a novel; at 160 pages, it’s more of a novella, but what it really feels like is a short story that outgrew the form without quite becoming something else. There are flashbacks to the night of the accident that add nothing since what happened is not a mystery; Jo begins her narration with a thorough account of that night. There is also a superabundance of information about Hawthorne—its history, its traditions—when all the reader needs to know is that it’s a New England prep school. Most problematic, though, is the emotional flatness of the story, which is particularly disappointing from a writer as skilled at illuminating the inner lives of women as Walbert.
Timely but not the author’s finest work.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9939-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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